Top 10 VFX Scenes of 2009

In the year of the great recession, Hollywood blockbusters went bigger. There were taller Transformers, wider tidal waves, and, in the case of Avatar, more dimensions with which to pummel your brain. The running times were bigger, too—of the ten movies we selected for their landmark visual-effects (VFX) scenes, five were more than two-and-a-half hours long. Call it the year of the VFX epic, or maybe the year of the director's cut. We watched every bloated minute of it, arguably more on-screen carnage than any other year at the movies. And after crawling out from under the digital wreckage of one antimatter bomb, two destroyed aircraft carriers, countless leveled cities and no less than three planets painstakingly torn apart, we're happy to report that CGI can sometimes conjure up some swell-looking alien faces, too. Here are the best VFX scenes of 2009 (about half of which are spoilers, so consider yourself alerted).

Before the final plot twist drains all semblance of life from this sequel to The Da Vinci Code, there is a moment of eery, violent beauty: the bomb that everyone was looking for blows up. It's actually a stolen vial of antimatter, which is suspended in a magnetic field, and helicoptered high above St. Peter's Square by Ewan McGregor's selfless, heroic priest. When the vial's battery dies, the antimatter touches matter, and the resulting high-altitude explosion unleashes a few shockwaves below, and something luminous above. The midair aftermath is too otherworldly to really describe, a kind of slowly shifting, malignant thunderhead, lit from within in red and blue. The fact that the detonation is based on zero real-world reference, and even less science, is just part of its ethereal charm.

Having already razed and frozen our most beloved cities and landmarks in Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, director Roland Emmerich adopts the cinematic equivalent of a scorched earth policy for 2012. California crumbles into the ocean in minutes. The White House gets smacked by an aircraft carrier that's surfing the biggest tidal wave imaginable. For tomorrow's disaster movie directors, the bar hasn't been raised--it's been annihilated. The result is numbing and almost 100 percent digital, videogame-y enough to make you pine for the exploding scale models of Independence Day. One of the only moments of legitimate shock and awe, however, is the eruption of Yellowstone National Park, which has been turned into a super volcano by the global spike in seismic activity. The moment it blows is a stunning vision of hell on earth, with the initial flash and plume of a nuclear strike, followed by cascading waves of roiling flame. There was a time when CG fire, both in movies and videogames, was one of the hardest effects to pull off. In 2012, it might be the one visual that truly works.

In a movie filled with squandered opportunities, Terminator Salvation makes perfect use of one particular cameo, by bringing back Arnold--all the way from 1984. Instead of having the present-day California governor reprise his role as a T-800 cyborg, McG asked his effects team to resurrect the Cold War-era Arnold. Legacy Effects dug out a lifemask taken of Schwarzenegger 25 years ago, and created a cleaned-up version for Industrial Light & Magic to use as reference. ILM's digital reconstruction was then mapped onto a body double. The result is a spooky, almost existential reveal, as a nude, scowling, freakishly young Arnold confronts resistance leader John Connor (Christian Bale). McG, true to form, missed the point, telling the Los Angeles Times that the new face was based on "scans from the first picture," back when 3D scans didn't exist, and computer-generated effects were limited to light cycles. Still, it's a well-handled scene because it knows its limitations--the resurrected Arnold doesn't speak, and quickly has his skin, including his distinctive face, seared off. What's left is that equally iconic chrome skeleton, reanimated by ILM with more heft and menace than any pure CG robot could ask for.

7. Where the Wild Things Are

In theory, the Wild Things should have looked ridiculous, like digital rejects from Kung Fu Panda, awkwardly crammed into a live-action movie. Or they could have been kitschy, Muppet-like throwbacks, all floppy mouths and lifeless puppet eyes. By combining classic, Sid Krofft-style monster suits with computer-animated faces, Spike Jonze created Wild Things just as moody, feral and irresistible as Sendak's original illustrations. Cliched as it sounds, nothing prepares you for Max's first interaction with the monsters. Their plump bodies have weight and momentum, obeying the laws of physics in all the subtle ways that CG creatures don't. Meanwhile, their faces are huge and expressive, but never exaggerated or cutesy, and covered in the same ragged fur as the rest of them. The Wild Things work because they look like monster suits come to life. Plus, there's something in those big, fake puppy eyes that's completely heartbreaking.

The best scene in J.J. Abrams Star Trek reboot doesn't feature black holes, red matter or scantily-clad blue ladies. When the Enterprise's transporters are jammed, Kirk, Sulu and a doomed soul in a red-suit perform an old-fashioned, orbital space dive onto a mining platform, in an attempt to save the planet Vulcan. From a narrative perspective, the scene has reboot written all over it, reminding the audience that, even in a utopian, ultra-high-tech future, stuff breaks. Also, that the Federation are more than a bunch of glorified George Jetson button pushers. Technically, the space jump is flawless, taking familiar skydive imagery and giving it a sci-fi scale. On paper, it was also simple: the actors were suspended on cables, and ILM digitally inserted the clouds and the massive drilling platform. In practice, juggling real objects, CGI environments and high-velocity, steady cam-style cinematography is a major VFX challenge. The final product is the most memorable moment in the movie--and more badass by far than the swashbuckling fight scene that follows.

If there was one lesson to be learned from I Am Legend, it's that CG zombies look wacky. Precise control over decrepitude doesn't make up for gummy facial expressions and a very non-scary sense of weightlessness. So it was with great apprehension that Harry Potter fans waited for the zombie-like Inferni to appear. Potter and Dumbledore's subterranean encounter with the undead victims of Voldemort is one of the highlights of the entire series of novels, a tense, ultimately futile quest that foreshadows a bigger tragedy to come. When the Inferni show up, they're nothing like you'd expect from Hollywood, closer to concentration camp prisoners than ravenous liches. In fact, the digital artists used photo reference from Auschwitz and other camps as reference. These sad, dead things pull Harry underwater without malice, as though doing him a favor. There's a glimpse of what's down there--submerged mountains of writhing corpses--before a firestorm erupts overhead, and flaming Inferni drop, still burning, into the water. The scene ends abruptly, after a few more shots of Inferni scattering, and Dumbledore's hellfire swirling across the underground lake. It's barely enough time to realize that three of the most difficult digital effects of all--fire, water, and zombies--could come together so effortlessly.

If you can forgive at least some of Michael Bay's trespasses--the abuse of plot, the racial stereotypes, and the stubborn belief that any of his comic relief is comical--and sit through the first half of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, your reward is quite possibly the best giant robot fight in history. Optimus Prime faces off against an entire gang of Decepticons, in a whirl of shattered trees, balletic knife-and-gunfighting and two particularly brutal point-blank robot deaths. The core VFX are no different than in the original Transformers, and less technically complex than Fallen's extended Egyptian finale. It's the digital fight choreography that leaves an impression, and the juxtaposition of all that vicious metal rolling and slicing through a sea of trees. In a movie filled with robots humping peoples legs and firing missiles from their crotches, this almost counts as poignant.

First of all, who cares if he was naked in the comic--Dr. Manhattan should have worn pants. Or a thong. There's a reason artist Dave Gibbons applied a minimum of detail to the atomic superhero's unclothed genitalia, and a very good reason that Michelangelo's David has what some consider a modest endowment. The penis attracts enough attention as is, even when it isn't a radiant, antifreeze blue. Which is all to say, if only all of Watchmen, and all of Dr. Manhattan's on-screen appearances, were as elegantly handled as his origin story, a series of flashbacks firing through the troubled god's nonlinear brain during a stroll across Mars. Every VFX shot is a masterpiece: His body dissolves in an atomic test chamber, and then stalks the hallways as a disembodied brain and nervous system. There are the quick, almost throwaway images of the reborn Dr. Manhattan, casually crumpling a tank, and towering above the Vietnamese jungle like a colossus, disintegrating an enemy soldier by pointing at him. It's a gorgeous nightmare of a vignette, enough to make you stop giggling about a certain appendage, until it shows up again, right there on Mars, and you're back to wondering how many people spent how many hours modeling, you know, the physics of that thing.

Was it worth the 15-year wait, the invention of an entirely new 3D movie camera and more collective hype than any film in recent memory? That might depend on whether you buy into the 3D revolution. Or whether you consider Avatar a sci-fi epic packed with game-changing CG action scenes, or the world's longest, most expensive, and definitely most thrilling videogame cut-scene. Here's something everyone can agree on: Those giant, blue, cat-monkey faces are incredible. Borrowing many of the same performance-capture techniques that made Gollum so believable, James Cameron added head-mounted cameras aimed right at the actors' faces, providing more reference data than ever to digitize their expressions. In the first scene between remote clone pilot Jake Sully and the alien princess Neytiri, it's clear that Cameron has creating something unprecedented. Sully, played by Sam Worthington, has an impish, fanged grin that's way too charming for a fully-CG character. But Zoe Saldana's Neytiri is a jumble of choked-back tears, feline hissing and come hither glances. Traditionally, a CG character doing this much emoting is an exaggerated mess. Neytiri is a living, breathing creature, who just happens to have been pieced together in a server farm. As Sully chases his new crush through the bioluminescent alien jungle, it's hard to remember that none of this is real. 3D may or may not be the future of movies, but Avatar's fully-rendered world is definitely the future of blockbusters.

Avatar's VFX look like $300 million bucks. But so do the effects in District 9, a $30 million movie filmed among the landfills and lean-tos of Johannesburg, South Africa. The film's unnamed alien refugees--a bug-like species referred to only as prawn--look as real as Pandora's blue-skinned hybrid supermodels. But the challenge here was even greater: How do you make a race of hideous, garbage-eating insects sympathetic, when all of their dialogue appears subtitled, and their range of expression begins and ends with their eyebrows? Many of the prawn's movements were pulled off with performance-capture, but the dizzying amount of texture and detail in their wiggling antennae and mandibles and oozing, chitinous hides was raw CG craftsmanship. And their eyes finally sell the story, convincing reluctant hero Wikus van de Mierwe to fight the humans on their behalf. That finale offers up another stunning effect--a prawn-built powered armor suit with an array of missiles, machine guns and death rays. The suit is both agile and gangly, and, like the aliens, strangely expressive, looking more and more like a wounded animal as the corporate mercenaries chip away at its armor. And again, it looks real, and more convincing in its lumbering physicality than Avatar's powered suits. Wikus's last stand is a long, grueling battle, punctuated by a final piece of virtuoso VFX. The head merc is surrounded by prawn, the aliens clicking and whining as they close in. Each one is wearing its own pathetic, patchwork of second-hand human clothing. They're streaked with dust and grime, and gleaming dully in the sun. They are perfect. The merc's decapitated head, on the other hand--that just looks silly.